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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Wayside" data-source="post: 704433" data-attributes="member: 8394">Assuming that works of art are attempts to express/model/respresent human experience.  I like that you say human experience, because I agree that's the key, but expression and representation are definitely arguable concepts, and, depending on what you mean by model, some would throw that one out too, in favor of contain.quote:--------------------------------------------------------------------------------I detest the modernist movement to judge literature on the basis of how it tricks someone into believing that they suddenly can sympathize with how it must have felt to have been X in Y situation - especially if X is some ethnic minority and Y is a situation of oppression.--------------------------------------------------------------------------------Mallus already responded to this.  Quite right, it's not modernism or postmodernism at all.  In fact there's a common literary term, the 'affective fallacy,' that denies the value of art based on emotional response and, by extension, denies (also as the 'intentional fallacy') that the emotions or intentions of the artist can be recovered from the work of art at all.  The latter fallacy is b.s., but the former is dead on.  It sounds like you're groping after some iteration of postcolonialism, and just got it wrong.As long as we're talking about painting, it's easy to make this argument.  Move to words and you're screwed.  I'd love to post the logic but this whole discussion is kind of OT and I don't know that I could do it in fewer than 5000 words <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f641.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":(" title="Frown    :("  data-smilie="3"data-shortname=":(" /> .  I'll just say that in the theory of emotions more attention is being paid to the idea of the performative, and it isn't a giant leap to get to the view that an emotion is a concept of itself from this.  In other words the interpretation of the thing is actually the thing itself.  If we want to 'read' paintings, as it were, in this way, the same would be true.It happens, and for the reader/viewer it can be a great thing.  Hence Bloom's The Anxiety of Influence.  I don't think reader-response theory is what it's all about though.  I like some really stupid music in addition to the good music I like.  That doesn't mean I can't be aware it's stupid music.  I respond to it, but that's not what it's all about.  It still sucks, whether I respond to it or not.The work stands like a monument through time that nobody can touch.  Some people can't stand this idea and want art to roll in the dirt with them, but.. well.. I don't know what to say.  That isn't a failing of mine.</blockquote>

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